Gluten-Free Recipes

It's the last day of the year! Where has time gone?
This has been a bumpy ride of a year for our family. The lows have been very low, and the highs pretty up there. Despite the losses and the headaches there's always a reason to toast to a new year. As a chocolate lover myself, ...

We all know and love the classic mofongo, but that ball of garlicky goodness has a bajillion calories (rounding up). I am here to bring the kind of life-changing good news that one hopes to get this time of the year: This Camarofongo (light, non-fried version of shrimp mofongo) is every bit as good as ...

Please stop staring at these Baked Bollitos de Yuca (Cassava and Cheese Balls) for a second and let's talk about something.
Developing and writing recipes may look easy at first glance--something I also believed before I started writing this blog-- but the reality is that if you want to do it right, it's a long, sweaty, ...

Our relationship with food and cooking has changed tremendously in the last ten or so decades, more so in the last few. Cooking was considered a skill, something you mastered after years of helping in the kitchen, working alongside the older women in your family. Cooking was primarily a female activity.
On the one hand it ...

Instead of titling this "Easier Potato Tortilla (Omelette)" maybe we should have gone with "Guess who’s coming to dinner – Dominican style".
My experiences of adjusting to Dominican customs and etiquette surrounding food and eating have become a theme – and possibly also a standing joke - of some of our articles here.
One such lesson that ...

A few years ago I asked my mother for the only thing I wanted to inherit from her: our family photos.
To me, photography is not only a passion, it is my memory. Along with defective genes, a lousy memory is also part of my inheritance. The box containing the yellowed photos in varied states of ...

Summer is chugging along, and we continue our series of light summer dishes that require little to no cooking, and are perfect for the season. What's not to love about that?
This time we have a dish based on a South American classic that has spread the world over. You'll love this Shrimp and Mango Ceviche ...

As a denizen of this little tropical corner of the world, I am very spoiled when it comes to fruits. We have the juiciest, sweetest mangoes, delectable and fragrant papayas, blissfully sweet watermelons, and... well, it's too long a list to mention. We are also in the unique position to grow fruits that don't normally grow ...

This is a post to say goodbye. Don't worry, nobody is going anywhere, not literally at least. I think I am being too melodramatic. Does that happen to ladies "of a certain age"?
I have been doing this for 13 years, and by "this" I mean writing this blog. It's fair to say that outside my ...

Sometimes some dishes just don't work. Don't worry, I am not talking about the moro-locrio (rice with pork and black beans). This one actually did.
I love experimenting with food -- isn't that obvious? Inspiration for new recipes come from everywhere, and sometimes things work in my head much better than they turn out in reality. That is ...

In most countries of the world March 8th is marked as International Women's Day. A day to celebrate women, and particularly for some of us, the ones that have influenced us.
What better dish to treat with you than an adaptation of my mom's classic arroz con leche? I have added coconut to my mom's rice ...

My hate of summer is abundantly documented in our blog.
OK, hate might be too strong a word, dislike is more like it. I don't function well in the sweltering heat and humidity we are subjected to for a couple of months in my corner of the world, and I spend all summers making up dishes ...

It's that time of the year again, or so I am reminded by the commercials interrupting my TV viewing. You know, Valentine's Day.
I can't be bothered to care.
You know how I demonstrate my love to my dear husband? I cook meat for him. Yeah, I almost never eat meat, but I don't mind cooking it ...

And I am back!
After nearly three weeks of practicing the art of barajar (doing nothing), I don't really feel relaxed as much as I feel just... lazy. I could get used to this. I cooked a lot, tried a few new recipes (that I will share with you in the future), and spent a lot of ...

Speaking strictly about food, we could have done much worse than to be colonized by the Spanish.
Spain has one of Europe's richest culinary traditions, a richness that was in no small measure influenced by the "Moorish" occupation of the peninsula from 710 to 1491 AD, a whopping 782 years. Over 200 years longer than "European ...

This is a blog that straddles many different "worlds". Something that is perfectly symbolized by a pumpkin spice latte flan.
Two bloggers belonging to multi-cultural families, trying to instill a love for traditional Dominican cuisine in our children, while at the same time trying to equally inspire their love for the cuisine of the other branches ...

Dominican arepa is a cornmeal and coconut cake, traditionally prepared in an iron pot on top of red-hot coal. A metal lid is placed on the pot, then more coal is put on the lid. This led to the expression "como la arepa: fuego por arriba y fuego por abajo" (like an arepa, fire underneath, fire ...

I love creating recipes, it's the closest to being a kid with a chemical set you can be after you are legally able to drive.
My favorite recipes come out of any sort of challenge. In this case I found myself with a pack of chorizo that I had in the fridge for a while, and ...

We Dominicans love rice. It's no wonder that we hear "it's not lunch without rice" all the time.
The sad thing is that we always stick to the same kind of rice. The long-grain rice that is used in traditional Dominican cooking is one of about 40,000 varieties of the grain. You read right, 40,000!
What I ...

If I were to write a book titled All the Things I Know Little to Nothing About, anthropology would be there somewhere.
Even so, I am going out on a limb and say that a country's socio-economical situation must influence its culinary culture. To me it seems self-evident.
This would explain why dishes like this berenjenas guisadas con ...

I bet every cook has his Waterloo: those dishes that on occasion bring him to his knees. For some is baking, mine is meat.
I have never been a big meet lover, even if in my time I ate a few questionable meats that would give nightmares to a lot of you. Meat is meat, after ...

Before I became a vegan in my early 20s I was the perfect eater: I would eat anything - at least once. This included foods of questionable provenance and some very unorthodox meat cuts. It's fair to say that prior to that I was a voracious meat-eater. I eventually quit my vegan adventure, but even ...

We change our eating habits significantly during the summer. That's what happens when you live in the tropics. I am always looking for cooling dishes and dishes that don't require long cooking. We loved this watermelon summer salad. I served it for dunch the other day and we practically licked the bowl clean.
- "Wait... 'dunch?!'"
Dunch ...

If you don't know what casabe (cassava bread) is, Aunt Ilana wrote a fantastic article that explains it all. You'd be well-served to read it.
If you know what casabe is, you are probably asking yourself why I have to write a recipe for it. After all, Dominicans don't make casabe at home. We just walk ...

This stunning Spanish seafood black rice is one of my favorite dishes. For a seafood lover such as myself, it's just perfect: jam-packed with seafood and strong ocean flavors. It speaks of summer and lazy days to me. As soon as the days started warming up I was back to my old love.
And speaking of ...

I must tell you that my daughter and I have a bit of an obsession with these oatmeal and nut breakfast muffins.
It's never too early to teach kids to love good, healthy food, and to instill in them the love for cooking. With some assistance (with the oven part) my 7-year old was capable of ...

Vegan Sancocho? Do you know what a sancocho is? If so, I know what you're thinking: "if it's vegan, then it isn't sancocho". After all the recipe in our blog is called a "seven meat-stew". You can hardly get any more carnivorous than that, short of chasing and killing your own prey.
I love sancocho, but ...

I am not sure what changes as one grows older. Slowly our taste in foods change, and things that we would have considered "gross" or that we didn't like as kids slowly become acceptable foods, enjoyable even. I have yet to meet a kid who doesn't love pasta, or one who enjoys eggplants.
Likewise, I have ...

A few weeks back in a conversation with some fellow bloggers I mentioned that eventually I might run out of Dominican dishes to write about. Oops. Hit the panic button!
Not really. I have four words for you: morir soñando (milk and orange) ice cream.
In 12 years doing this I have gone through about a little over ...

We all have talents. Big talents, and minor ones.
One of my minor talents is the ability to remember what foods my friends and relatives don't like or are allergic to, once they have been my guests. As minor talents go, this comes in pretty handy if you don't want to end your dinners with unhappy ...

Wanna hear what I did this weekend?
I worked 16 hours a day for 3 days, I squeezed the work of a week in those hours. It doesn't sound like a lot of fun, but trust me, I loved it. If you do what you love for a living, you'll be on vacation all your life.
I ...

While I would love to think of myself as an intrepid investigative writer, travelling the Dominican countryside in search of hidden treasures of our culinary culture, the fact is that I am nowhere near that. We just travel aimlessly around the country from time to time, sampling the local foods and befriending perfect strangers on ...

For today I had a rich dish that included a cup of butter in its preparation. There was a change of plans.
The night I was supposed to go in the kitchen to make this dish I woke up at 3AM with a dull pain in my stomach. Don't worry, nothing more serious than an upset ...